With allusions to the black literary canon and chapter titles drawn from African-American music, Sisney’s tragicomic memoir...
Retired English professor Sisney’s (Growth Through Fiction: Short Stories for the Basic Reader, 2008) improbably comic memoir about a black woman’s career in white-dominated academia.
Born into a working-class African-American community in Kentucky during the waning Jim Crow years, Sisney traversed a veritable cultural minefield to get her doctorate and a tenured professorship. In five decades at “white institutions,” including 30 years at California Polytechnic State University, Sisney faced formidable sexism and racism. The author blends seriousness and humor when documenting life as a double-minority professor in the 1970s, ’80 and ’90s. She gives fellow professors entertaining pseudonyms such as Superfly, a white male professor who worked overtime to convey his coolness via “some kind of jive talking, black hip language.” She occasionally switched to black vernacular to “fix his old white ass,” a typical example of the author’s wry way of coping with insufferable colleagues. Sisney critiques culture and politics with similar hilarity, describing, for instance, her desire to administer a “No Fool Left Behind” test to former President George W. Bush to assess his literary aptitude. Even plentiful parentheses, a couple of long-running chapters and overly detailed accounts of academic committee meetings fail to dampen the farcical spirit that animates the book. Beneath all this humor, however, is an unflinching account of the serious discriminatory practices that fester in the supposedly enlightened ivory tower. Although primarily about her career, the narrative also touches on Sisney’s personal life, with particularly poignant reflections on her fraught relationship with her mother. The book brims with pop-culture references and, at times, peculiar and funny meditations on topics ranging from contemporary American sexuality to O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.
With allusions to the black literary canon and chapter titles drawn from African-American music, Sisney’s tragicomic memoir speaks to a diverse audience.Pub Date: May 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482707250
Page Count: 510
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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